My neighbors in Endwell, New York, are reasonable people. But last February, when their kids came home from Homer Brink Elementary School with a flyer about a new after-school club, they freaked out. They didn’t know what the After School Satan Club was all about, and they didn’t think Satanism had a place in their local public school.
They weren’t alone. This week in Olathe, Kansas, thousands of citizens signed an online petition to ban a new high school Satan Club, warning that it meant “satanic indoctrination” for their public school.
Both clubs were outreach efforts of the Satanic Temple, an atheist activist group founded in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2013. June Everett, director of the Satanic Temple’s After School Satan Club program, insists the clubs are not teaching children to worship Satan. Their point, rather, is to protest the use of public schools by Christian organizations. The After School Satan Clubs only open in schools that include similar after-school clubs run by conservative evangelical Christian groups. The Satan Clubs, Everett says, promise a “fun, intellectually stimulating, and non-proselytizing alternative to current religious after-school clubs.”
Not everyone has limited their opposition to complaints and petitions. In Iowa, a Christian military vet and failed congressional candidate knocked the head off a statue erected by the Satanic Temple at the state house. Though deputies charged Michael Cassidy with criminal mischief, conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA rushed to his defense, pledging $10,000 for legal fees and proclaiming, “We stand with Satan Slayer.”
Those outraged about Satan in schools and other public buildings—reasonable and unreasonable alike—are directing their anger in the wrong direction. The people most responsible for allowing Satan into these spaces are not the leaders of the Satanic Temple. They are not even school administrators or heathen Democrats. No, the people most to blame are some of America’s most prominent conservatives—including Supreme Court Justice Clarence........